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The strong connection between eugenics and nationalism is now a clear interpretive strand in the historiography. This article discusses various studies of eugenics and emphasizes the international dimension. The long-standing historiographical interest in this aspect of eugenics stems partly from the availability of the proceedings of early international conferences. It also deals with the most ambitious consideration of eugenics and internationalism that involves consideration of apparently universal principles of evolution and inheritance for humanity as a whole. It also presents a close consideration of the role of eugenics in regulating and monitoring international human movement. Finally, it concludes that eugenics is fundamentally about the devastating implications of a science of human differentiation and needs to be understood through the modern history of universalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism.

Alison Bashford is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on the modern history of science and medicine, including Purity and Pollution (1998) and Imperial Hygiene (2004), and has coedited Contagion (2001), Isolation (2003), and Medicine at the Border (2006). She is currently completing a history of geopolitics and the world population problem in the twentieth century. In 2009-2010 she was Visiting Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University, with the Department of the History of Science.

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